Dennis Prager: A Voice for Reasonable Moral Thinking

I am not a huge fan of talk-radio, even less so of talk-television. I find much of this medium inane. It is more about entertainment than about provoking real thought. There are a few exceptions to this general rule, which proves the old adage that “exceptions prove the rule.”

I do listen to some talk-radio when I am in my car. This time period in my car is often in the middle of the day when I am going to and from appointments. One person I consistently enjoy listening to on the radio is the conservative Jewish talk-show host Dennis Prager. I have recently begun to read his online material www.dennisprager.com as well his published books. I sometimes disagree rather strongly with Prager about important moral and social issues; especially on abortion (he favors legal abortion with strong limitations in the first trimester).

Like me Dennis Prager is not a consistent conservative partisan politically. He often sides with the Republican Party on matters of national defense and public policy but his criticisms of the president, for over-spending and thus for creating larger national debt, are very often compelling. He questions President Bush on several matters of policy that I feel more Christians should think about and offer better alternatives. To use Prager’s own helpful words, found in the title of a 1995 book, we should “think a second time.”

On today’s (2/27) broadcast Dennis Prager summed up my own feelings about our two major national parties by saying one party was “stupid” and other was “dangerous.” I will let you decide which is which. In the big picture I will generally pick stupid over dangerous. I find Prager’s simple common sense logic quite compelling at this point. Many Christian intellectuals will quibble in ways that fail to address many of the really important issues we now face in a post-9/11 context. We are, I am very convinced, dealing with a strange new world and much foolishness abounds on the left and the right as we face a new kind of enemy, an enemy who mixes religion and tyranny in ways previously unseen in the modern era. This present enemy is nothing like Communism or Nazism and the sooner we realize this the better. Moral clarity is needed and Prager very often gives it.